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Jeffrey Eugenides, in conversation with Michael Wood

February 10, 2014

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to acclaim in 1993. It has been translated into 34 languages and made into a feature film. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review, and Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists.”

Eugenides is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Henry D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the past few years he has been a Fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American Academy in Berlin. After several years in Berlin and Chicago, Eugenides now lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter, where he is Professor of Creative Writing in the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton.

In 2003, Jeffrey Eugenides received The Pulitzer Prize, the WELT-Literaturpreis of Germany, and the Great Lakes Book Award for his novel MIDDLESEX (FSG, 2002; Picador, 2003). MIDDLESEX was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, France’s Prix Medici, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Michael Wood, the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, is a prominent literary and cultural critic with a column in the London Review of Books and a long list of publications to his name. His interests include film studies, postcolonialism and literary criticism, and he is an expert on the modern novel in English, French, German and Spanish.

After earning his bachelor's and doctoral degrees at Cambridge, Wood took his first teaching position there. He traveled as a freelance writer and taught at Columbia and the University of Exeter before coming to Princeton in 1995. He chaired the Gauss Seminars in Criticism from 1995 to 2001 and the English department from 1998 to 2004.